all sorts of good climbing

all sorts of good climbing news.--got an email yesterday from joe at new england bouldering; my iron palm is on the way. --when i got home from work today, i had a fancy new pair of five.ten zlippers waiting for me... i guess my letter from a few weeks ago did the trick. i was sorta hoping there would also be an apology letter... "please accept our deepest apologies for selling such a shoddy product; allow us to shower you with free gifts." etc. --campusing tonight was great. i was able to pull 1-4-7-10-13, starting with either hand. i think i might almost be ready for hound ears by next week.

so, as part of my

so, as part of my training for hound ears, i'm trying to lose maybe 5 pounds between now and weekend-after-next. let me just give you a little rundown of the snacks that i found waiting in the programmer's pod this morning. a 3lb bag of the most fantastic trail mix, ever. cashews, almonds, real m&ms... i could go on. a 40oz barrel of pretzel sticks. a 12.5oz box of goldfish. half of a 14oz bag of pretzel nuggets. a 20oz bag of assorted "fun size" chocolate bars; milky way, 3 musketeers, twix, snickers, and milky way "midnight". a small ziploc bag of wasabi peanuts.

i'll be lucky if i'm not 5 pounds heavier by next saturday.

From: Jim Horton To: matt

From: Jim HortonTo: matt Subject: Congratulations! You're in Hound Ears

ok, so i'm in! after thinking that i had sent my registration in too late, i was notified at the end of the week that i got my stuff in under the wire, and i'll be going to hound ears. there's a limit of 275 people, and when i mailed my check for $45 in, there was already like 220 people signed up, so i figured there was no way my stuff would get there in time. stranger still, is that my former neighbors and current climbing partners sent their stuff in even later, and they also made it.

so, the plan is to hit the gym, hard. there's two weeks left to train, and i'm hoping to be able to hit the gym 4 times a week, maybe 3-4 hours. of course, my skin will never last that long on plastic, so i went all crazy today and ordered a few bottles of iron palm. that should help me train a bit harder, and more importantly help me be able to climb for 8 hours on all that lovely southern sandstone.

gimme shoes!

went to the post office over lunch to mail back my shoes to the manufacturer, hoping to get a free pair. Dear Five.Ten,

I have enclosed my pair of Zlippers, size 9 ½ US, which I have owned for about 4 months. You will notice that the stitching has begun to rip in a non-abrasion area on both shoes, so I’m assuming this is a manufacturing defect. I own several other pairs of your shoes, including 2 pairs of Moccasyms, a pair of Anasazi velcros (great shoes but little smelly!), and a pair of your new V-10s (also a great shoe, but much more “aggressively” sized than the Moccasyms).

The Zlippers are by far my favorite all around shoe, so I was quite dismayed when they began to fall apart, well before I think they should have. I have friends that own the same shoes (they recommended them to me), that they have owned for longer, climbed in more often, and have not displayed the same disintegration.

I just wanted to bring this to your attention.

Yours truly,

Matthew C.

i tried to strike the right balance between indignant and sucking up... i think it worked out ok, and brian tells me that five.ten is pretty good about replacing shoes. hopefully i'll have them back in time for the comp.

while at the post office, the girl in line in front of me was mailing a package (i'm assuming it was a pair of shoes, based on the size of the box, and the fact that it came out of a ninewest bag) to hong kong. the total (w/out insurance) came to about $68! that's quite a few bucks... i hope they're really special shoes.

i have to leave tonight for a work trip down to miami to visit one of our clients, and then fly back tomorrow night. i just saw on headline news that they've raised a nationwide alert of that stupid "terror color" scheme to orange, which is one step below "duck." i don't mind flying on the anniversary of 9/11, but i already know that airport security is going to be a major hassle. i'm considering leaving my palm, my phone, and anything else that might even seem like it could be dangerous at home.

this weekend, i went climbing

this weekend, i went climbing outside saturday, and inside sunday. on saturday i did the hardest boulder problem, ratings-wise, that i've done... indoors or out. it didn't _feel_ like the hardest one, but there you have it. it was still immensely satisfying. i have to get strong, quickly, because i'm going to a comp in about a month, and i really would like to make a decent showing, but i won't worry about it too much. the comp is in an area that's only open 1 day a year, so it will be nice/fun/cool/exciting to climb on all that rock that is so rarely touched. took a new route in this morning on the bike; it's street the whole way, as opposed to the 3 miles of trail i was taking the other way. this way was much more thrilling; lots more traffic, but on streets wide enough that i didn't crap my pants. there's a very looooong downhill section that was great on the way in, but i think will be hell on the way back, so i might take the trail route, which is longer, but more moderate. means i'll probably get home in about the same amount of time as if i was struggling with that hillclimb, anyway.

very excited about tonight; the Special Lady Friend is going to be making dinner. she's got a grill of some sort, and she's going to be grilling up a bunch of vegetables. she's quite the cook.

so very close now.

so very close now. all the nasty, cummy mattresses scavanged from curbs in oakland are wrapped in heavy-duty plastic.

finished putting up all the framing last night, even got one of the 3 plywood sheets with all the t-nuts hung. tomorrow night we're all meeting to collect "monies" (startup contributions, first month's rent, etc.), hang the last two sheets of plywood, maybe set one route, and then go out and have some beers to celebrate.

of course, there's "mandatory drinking" with co-workers after work tomorrow night. i might be in trouble by the end of the night.

i figured out yesterday that

i figured out yesterday that i am definitely not cut out to be a carpenter. a group of about 15 climbers from our gym have decided to build a climbing co-op. we're tired of everything; the routes, the lack of air conditioning or even a fan, crap music on the radio, and bad attitude. so, we got together and decided to make our own wall.

so, this weekend was a lot of construction. i missed saturday, because i was helping friends move (more on that later). yesterday i rode down around 11, and worked until about 6 or so. pounded maybe 200 t-nuts, and more nails than i could count. almost all the framing is done, and probably just one more night of work to finish putting the framing together, mounting it on the wall, and hanging the plywood sheets that the holds will actually be screwed into. we have a buttload of holds coming from pusher, plus others that people already had or "borrowed". we could be climbing on it by this weekend, if we're lucky.

but, in the course of pounding all the nails and t-nuts yesterday, i managed to rip my palm open with the claw of a hammer, get a nice big splinter under the nail of my index finger, and today my right hand is so sore i can't even close it all the way. don't know how people actually do that for a living.

back from a long weekend of climbing

so, just got back from a long weekend of climbing. a great time was had by all, except that the area we went to on friday. the climbing itself there was great, but all over the place there were these spiders. now, i'm not normally freaked out by spiders, but these things were hairy. and big; like sneak-into-the-village-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-steal-your-newborn-child big. i hear that they're not even full-grown yet, and i should "wait until i see 'em in the fall." can't wait.

great weekend of climbing, although

great weekend of climbing, although i did get a little bit of a burn on sunday. that sun was strong. i think i was only in it for about 1/2 an hour. on the way home on sunday, i stopped at a "fireworks" tent in w.v. i use quotes around "fireworks", because they were anything but. i guess current paranoia about the world ending means that you can no longer have fireworks that blow shit up. everything now is wussy little roman candles, with all these high-falootin' names like "the titanic!" and "king kong". "bollocks", i say.

in college my old roomate was a firecracker afficionado. he would go to manhattan the week before the 4th, and find some illegal fireworks shop and bring home scary amounts of munitions. he had one that was about the size of a coffee can chopped in half. the fuse was as big as my pinky. there was a sculpture over on one of the rutgers campuses; looked like two ends of a trumpet welded together, and wouldn't you know it, that bomb fit perfectly down the tube. so, we hooked up a cigarette fuse, and ran over to the bushes and hid.

about 5 minutes pass, and we're giggling like idiots with excitement. at the 10 minute mark, we started to wonder if perhaps the fuse had gone out. we get up to go see, and just as we stand up:

BOOOM!!

we didn't hurt the sculpture; it was a monstrous bronze thing, but it still made a sound like the sky had split open, and we ran to his car and sped off laughing like loons. now _that's_ a firecracker.

Bishop trip pictures posted

i finally, *finally* posted the pictures from my bishop trip. i used winXP's slideshow creation powertoy, and it's easy to use, but i don't really care for the finished product; it does some weird dhtml thing where it pre-loads EVERY picture (which in this case is about 100 files ~160k each), and it looks broken until it's done loading. i just want something simple that allows me to slap in templates, choose the "next/previous/first/etc" style, and maybe even put some captions on each one. does such a thing exist yet? i wasn't able to find one, but i also didn't look for very long.

washed out

well, the weekend certainly didn't turn out like i had planned. saturday was a very good day; air was cool, even if it was wet enough to wring out. got on something new at summersville; crimpy and fun. plans changed slightly saturday night, thou. some people we were climbing with lost their dog, so we got delayed because of all that, wound up eating at almost 10, and decided against driving all the way to the campsite and setting up at 11 p.m. got the hotel instead. next day we got pretty much rained out, but we were still down at the crag until 4 or so... weather was crazy on the drive back... went from cloudy to sunny to torrential downpour back to sunny in an hour's worth of driving.

got back, talked to my dad for awhile. crazy family stuff going on right now; maybe i'll actually want to write about it later.

Weekend Plans

aaah.. out of work and free for the weekend. should be a lovely weekend to go climbing. but tonight, going for dinner to my very favorite sushi place. every time i go to that place, it's an adventure. can't wait. the other "excitement" for the weekend is that it'll be my first time camping, instead of staying in a hotel down in w.v. the $60 every night was starting to get a little expensive, so i instead shelled out $400 in a lump for a tent, a sleeping bag, and some other misc camping gear. i also picked up a pair of flip-flops at old navy today (for the shower); they were out of normal colors, so i'm stuck with some patriotic red/white/blue things. hope that rumor about a peephole in the shower is just that...